Madonna herself once called the Blond Ambition Tour cathartic–or as her brother and then set designer called it “like growing up” because “you can’t get to one place without going through another.” This adjective, indeed, serves as the entire purpose of Strike A Pose, the Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan-directed documentary that highlights the lives of six of the original seven dancers (Gabriel Trupin, who died of AIDS in 1995, is represented by his mother, Sue) from Madonna’s groundbreaking 1990 tour.
Beginning with Luis Camacho voguing in front of a mirror with the voiceover, “I was the kind of child that was shy, but only outside of my house. When I was alone in my room I could feel like myself,” devotees of the original documentary will immediately notice the parallels of the structure. Truth or Dare, too, opens with a similar confessional voiceover, with Madonna remarking on how she already had to make her peace with the tour being over so she doesn’t have to feel the emotions later. In contrast, however, it seems as though all of Madonna’s dancers are only just now making their peace with the tour that served as both the major highlight and downfall of their careers (and personal lives). Thus, we must start at the beginning–how it all began: with Madonna “choosing” them. For she was very specific in her reasoning for hand-picking each person beyond the mere declaration, “I love having children to watch over.” No, it was much more than that for Madonna, who had a particular hard-on for “damaged goods,” shall we say, admitting, to Truth or Dare documentarian Alek Keshishian, “I think I’ve unconsciously chosen people that are emotionally crippled in some way, or who need mothering in some way because I think it comes very natural to me. It fulfills a need in me, I think, to be mothered.” Because yes, it’s true that Leos usually have some type motive behind their pursuit of others. And with each dancer of the Blond Ambition Tour, the emotional wounds were evident, whether it stemmed from family issues or the burden of having to conceal being HIV positive.
Madonna saw in each person the chance to be their savior, noting, “This was the opportunity of their lives. And I know that they’ve suffered a great deal in their lives, whether with their families or just being poor or whatever.” Paris Hilton-sounding or not, Madonna has a point about poverty. As Kevin Stea remarked of his life before going on the tour, “I had no money to eat, I had no money to, like, get around. I had a terrible highlighted mullet.” But when Madonna, a god-like presence in their lives, came along, all those days of drabness and poverty were replaced with the glamorous life of travel, accolades and free swag. But even more valuable, a sense of belonging in general, as well as belonging to a family–the members of which were the only people in the world who could understand the experience each one was going through.
Thus, to quote Madonna, “By the time we left Japan, I found myself growing really attached to the dancers, and I started feeling like a mother to them.” This attachment, however, eventually grew into Madonna needing to distance herself after the tour, most especially when drug use became more than recreational for those still in her favor. In point of fact, most of the dancers became enraptured with the party and “celebrity” lifestyle to a degree at which nothing else mattered except the drugs–Salim “Belgium stress” Gauwloos being the most candid about his obsession.
And then there is the lament of Gabriel’s mother over his need to keep his health condition a secret due to the stigma of AIDS. Oliver, too, is hit particularly hard with the loss of the fellow dancer he considered to be both his protector and the most innocent. So it is that when Oliver is asked, “What are you thinking about?,” he replies, “Just Gabriel and Carlton,” in a divergent answer from the original one Carlton gives when Madonna makes the same inquiry in Truth or Dare, with Carlton responding, “You,” instead. This is a mark of how much things have changed, particularly with regard to how the dancers once viewed Madonna. And likewise, she them. At one point gushing to her father in Truth or Dare, “Aren’t my dancers great? Aren’t they fab?,” those feelings have long since vanished, with Madonna perhaps only able to love them with such fervor precisely because of how naive they were at the time.
And as the documentary takes the route of filming each dancer in their current everyday lives, it seems almost cruel to see Carlton taking AIDS medication as the TV ironically asks him, “Who would you like to see on Where Are They Now?”
It’s a far cry from when the dancers were at least sought after for daytime TV–with Luis and Jose all too ready to appear on a panel for Geraldo Rivera, while one conservative white man seethed, “Madonna gets to people in the current order and is setting a tone that is destructive.” The appearances didn’t stop there, with Kevin Stea and Oliver Crumes appearing on Maury Povich (prime 90s daytime programming) with their lawyer, Debra Johnson, at the height of the lawsuit over the documentary and Crumes commenting of that period, “Really Madonna, do we have to go through this? And her look on her face was like, ‘How could you guys do this to me?’ But we’re looking like, ‘Well, in a way, if it wasn’t for us, there would be no movie.'”
Then again, if it weren’t for Madonna, there would be no Strike A Pose, no claim to fame for any of these dancers to make. So in this respect Strike A Pose proffers an even larger question regarding modern celebrity culture: are those that orbit true fame entitled to, if not credit, at least financial compensation just because they help drive the narrative (you know, like Kim Kardashian with Paris Hilton in The Simple Life)? It would seem the obvious answer is no, but when the person in question doesn’t “get something” once their fifteen minutes are up, the question becomes harder to answer–particularly for the one left with no fallback plan in terms of a career. And yet, overall, the documentary has no tone of begrudgement against Madonna, with (most of) the dancers recognizing, to use Kevin’s words, “I have no ill will toward her at all. I think the biggest shame or thing that I miss is the love.” Or as Luis says, “I don’t think she owes us any acknowledgement. I think she gave us a fantastic opportunity.” This, of course all comes at the end, as the group reunites for the first time in decades, and yes, the manner in which they’re huddled together with drinks in hand conjures both images of the pre-show prayer circle and Madonna’s toast to them toward the end of the tour, in which she states, “To a room full of people that I admire, that I appreciate, that I adore, that I love and that I would all separately at one time or another love to smack the shit out of.”
To continue the full-circle nature of the denouement, the dancers play a round of truth or dare, for old time’s sake, with all of them revealing the cowardice that comes with old age by only choosing truth. But then again, often the hardest–and bravest–thing is to acknowledge the truth. Which each dancer has done for the purpose of letting go of this part of their lives, for so long serving as a source of anger, bitterness and resentment–the three words that have never been part of Madonna’s post-Kabbalist brand.
